The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘Big Brother’ Category

This is just a quick one for those of you who have been drop­ping by look­ing for the “northlon­don­hippy BB column”.

And how do I know you were look­ing? I know because I am sad and I occa­sion­ally look at my user logs. Don’t worry, I’m not spy­ing on you and I wouldn’t know how to spy on you, online, anyway!

What I do glance at (and I have men­tioned this before) are the search terms used to locate my site. Run­ning quite high at present is “northlon­don­hippy BB col­umn” and its really nice that so many of you remember…but haven’t you all heard of book­mark­ing! Trust me, I’m worth it.

I’m sorry to dis­ap­point my fel­low BB fans, but I haven’t watched any of the cur­rent series, not a sin­gle moment. The for­mat just didn’t grab me.

BB is about the peo­ple in the house, not the voice of Big Brother. The fact that for the most part, we usu­ally don’t get to see the occu­pant of the “voice of god booth” is a good thing.

Mak­ing a fea­ture out of the voice of BB by cast­ing var­i­ous celebri­ties is a lame idea. Chang­ing the for­mat was an ill con­ceived idea, exe­cuted by peo­ple who were too quick to give in to the slight­est whiff of con­tro­versy and pres­sure. It lacks back­bone and con­vic­tion and is a total cop-out. It also cheap­ens the BB brand.

Look at how it has been rel­e­gated to E4, which many peo­ple with­out dig­i­tal tele­vi­sion still don’t receive. And where’s Davina? Even her greedy man­age­ment could smell the rot­ten stink on this one and gave her the win­ter off.

And how about that Der­mot O’Leary? Sure they are let­ting him front this series, which is his last on the pro­gramme, because Der­mie thinks the X-Factor is a bet­ter bet. I believe I read in the news­pa­per that even he has been crit­i­cal of this series and I had to read it twice to make sure my mind wasn’t play­ing tricks on me. Talk about bit­ing the hand that feeds you! Even I don’t pub­licly crit­i­cise my employ­ers like that (though pri­vately is another story).

I’m sure I would be watch­ing if it was just plain ol’ c-list celebrity BB, I’d even be watch­ing if it was a reg­u­lar BB, minus any celebrity com­po­nent, but this cur­rent rub­bish has no appeal to me.

If they’ve lost me as a viewer, they have really fucked it up this time. If I was to guess, I would expect the final deci­sion to shift the for­mat rests with Chan­nel 4 and not Ende­mol, but I have no evi­dence to back up this sup­po­si­tion. C4 han­dled the whole Shilpa Shetty thing badly and I reckon the same suits hijacked this series of BB.

This is the first year in the his­tory of Big Brother that I’m not feel­ing with­drawal after the series ended. I wasn’t as attached to the house­mates as I have been in pre­vi­ous years. I wasn’t as attached to the entire pro­gramme. I’m not really sure why.

Sorry I haven’t been quite as pro­lific as I could have been on the topic of BB. I did con­tinue to watch faith­fully though and now that it’s fin­ished, I thought I would share my final thoughts.

For me, Big Brother 8 was the most man­u­fac­tured, self-aware series so far. The for­mat has been around too long for it to be any other way. We all know what to expect, from the view­ers to the con­tes­tants, which means the pro­gram mak­ers have to work that much harder to con­found our col­lec­tive expectations.

This year, there were a lot of con­founded expectations.

“Fake Week” was a prime exam­ple of this as the pro­duc­ers twisted every­thing up into all sorts of point­less frivolity.

Except it wasn’t point­less, was it? It amused us. Ok, it amused me.

A lot this year amused me, it seems like the theme of “fun” really did weave itself through the series. Some of the fun was cruel and if I was on the receiv­ing end of the cru­elty, I would have a dif­fer­ent view of it.

Show­ing the Halfway-Housemates the entirety of nom­i­na­tions was a mas­ter­stroke of nas­ti­ness. Reveal­ing nom­i­na­tions in gen­eral inside the house is cruel, but there was a level of evil in this par­tic­u­lar move that sur­prised even me.

The quiz in the final week was also quite mean, as BB showed each house­mate some­thing both embar­rass­ing and pri­vate as part of the task.

All of this self-referential stuff is send­ing every­one a mes­sage: Noth­ing is off lim­its, inside the house. Any­thing you say or do could poten­tially be used to upset your stand­ing in the house. In future, con­tes­tants might be more care­ful and guarded about what the say in their pri­vate chats or even the diary room!

As much as I don’t want to admit it, Charley was the star of the show this year and it was less enter­tain­ing after her depar­ture. Or rather, there was far less con­flict in the house which I equate with enter­tain­ment. Charley’s prob­lem will be con­vert­ing this into some sort of media career. Good luck to her, but I think she’s a bit of one-trick-pony and they will strug­gle to find suit­able vehi­cles for her.

Chanelle’s depar­ture also left a gap in my view­ing. Aside from being nice to look at, her tantrums were pure com­edy gold. They say she’s made £750,000 already, which is astound­ing. Now that Ziggy’s out too, I expect they will both clean up even more. I sure hope they got a lot of money for their rather embar­rass­ing photo-shoot in the Star on Mon­day. If you didn’t see it, they were both pos­ing together, in their undies, in a hotel bed. Cringe!

Poor Ziggy. I liked him. He isn’t a bad guy; he’s just very neu­rotic. He gen­uinely fan­cied Chanelle, it wasn’t just for the cam­eras. He eas­ily had the rough­est ride of any­one in the house this year and doesn’t deserve our scorn. We should all chip in a fiver each, so we can pay for his long-term Jun­gian analy­sis, which after a cou­ple of decades might get to the root of his neu­ro­sis. Until then, he’ll just have to make do with shag­ging Chanelle and mak­ing money off their celeb-value.

I was glad to see Brian Belo win. He’s the Essex ver­sion of For­rest Gump and peo­ple always go for the thick-o. Except I don’t think Brian is that thick, he’s just not edu­cated well. He’s your typ­i­cal Eng­lish lad and prob­a­bly the world’s biggest BB fan! I think its great that a proper fan won the show, instead of some­one who claimed not to really watch it much. Well done, Brian.

I was actu­ally expect­ing a twinny-win, as Sam and Amanda are just so like­able. They didn’t put a foot wrong in the house which explains why they didn’t have a sin­gle nom­i­na­tion through­out the series.

I was glad to see Tracey go a week before the final and I’m even hap­pier I’ll never have to hear her inane catch­phrases ever again. She was like a char­ac­ter from a bad novel writ­ten about real­ity tv; a poorly sketched car­i­ca­ture con­sist­ing of one shal­low dimen­sion. Yawn.

As for the rest, well they’re all pretty incon­se­quen­tial really. The one I liked the most that I thought should have had more time in the house is Amy. Aside from being a tasty bit of eye candy, Amy seemed bright and gen­uine. She should never have become such a fig­ure of hate within the house and if she had bet­ter taste in men and ignored Liam, she might have gone further.

The one thing I noticed this year was the num­ber of peo­ple who I’ve spo­ken with who have taken great pride in pro­claim­ing that they haven’t watched BB this year and that BB was a fail­ing, dying for­mat. It was as if peo­ple decided they were too good for it this year. How wrong they are!

BB con­tin­ues to be annual event tele­vi­sion, fill­ing Chan­nel 4’s cof­fers with loads of dosh. The rat­ings were down this year, but the pro­gramme con­tin­ues to deliver the right demo­graphic that adver­tis­ers love and in the younger age groups, inter­est remains very high. Maybe I just only talk to aging media-types. I need to get some cooler, younger new friends!

And if there were any doubts over the future of the next series of BB, Davina promptly put them to rest last Fri­day night, when she opened the audi­tion call for BB9. If you want to spend next Sum­mer inside the BB house, be ready to daz­zle the BB pro­duc­ers, start­ing in Novem­ber. Good Luck!

I do want to thank all 23 house­mates who spent time in the house this year. One way or another, each of you enter­tained me in your own spe­cial ways and for this I am grate­ful. And thank you to my hip­py­fans, who have put up with my spo­radic out­put and stuck with me for my thoughts on BB.

This will be my last for­mal BB col­umn, I’m not going to do it again next year. I won’t say I’m never going to com­ment on BB again, but I won’t be doing it in such an organ­ised way. I hope you’ve all enjoyed read­ing it all as much as I’ve enjoyed writ­ing it.

But fear not, this hippy still has plenty of other inter­est­ing things to bring you, so don’t be a stranger, OK?

Polly Ver­non, writ­ing in today’s Observer news­pa­per, claims that the cur­rent series of Big Brother, is the best one yet.

You can check out what she says by click­ing RIGHT HERE.

I know my out­put on BB hasn’t been over­whelm­ing this year, but it’s not because I’m not enjoy­ing the series. I’m still watch­ing and I am still dig­ging it too.

I haven’t had that much time to write about it. I haven’t really been that both­ered. I think, this year, is my last year of for­mally try­ing to blog about BB. I think, as a topic for me, it’s stopped being fun.

I’d rather write about things that inspire me more.

All that said, I’m going to do one last piece on this series of BB at some point in the next week or so. I owe you all that much!

In the mean­time, check out that link I pro­vided to the Observer. I agree with most of what Ms. Ver­non says. You might, too.

Yes. Yes, I am.

I haven’t stopped watch­ing it. I just haven’t writ­ten about it in a while. I’m a bad hippy and deserve a spank­ing, but don’t get any funny ideas about send­ing Jonty ‘round to do the hon­ours. This hippy don’t play that way.

Not that there’s any­thing wrong with a lit­tle bit of light spank­ing, I would just pre­fer that it were Chan­nelle admin­is­ter­ing my much deserved pun­ish­ment. As if she would even look in my gen­eral direc­tion while hav­ing one of her infa­mous strops, let alone smack my ass for all she was worth!

Ah-hem.

The res­i­dents of the house have cer­tainly changed since last I com­mented on it. We’ve had a fake house­mate, we’ve seen Chan­nelle walk and Charley evicted, twice! We’ve also got five new best-friends, though after tonight, there will be pos­si­bly two less of them.

It seems to this more than casual observer of BB, that the pro­duc­ers have had some clever gim­mick up their sleeves every week of this run. A lot of it has been enter­tain­ing and amus­ing, but all of it is feel­ing some­what man­u­fac­tured. I guess that’s what the for­mat has become, after so many years of it. It’s had to change and evolve, to keep us all watching.

I’d watch any­way, but then I’d watch paint dry, if it was smeared all over a dozen com­plete strangers!

It’s been a weird series for me, I haven’t really warmed to any of them, but then I don’t really hate any of them either. My reac­tion to them is as bland as a con­ver­sa­tion with the twins.

I find Gerry nice, but too whiny and moany. I like Car­ole, but she doesn’t really shine either. The twins are cute, in a very imma­ture way. I could go on, but you get the idea.

I bought the Ziggy and Chan­nelle rela­tion­ship com­pletely. No one would put them­selves through that much angst and bull­shit, if they didn’t really have feel­ings for each other.

I dis­agree with all of you who think Ziggy was using her. No, I don’t think she was the love of his life, but I think his inten­tions were gen­uine. He liked her; he would have dated her prop­erly out­side the house if he could have. He couldn’t, instead he had to live with her for 2 inten­sive months.

Chanelle liked Ziggy too, but I go back to what I said before. She’s the sort of girl who always has a boyfriend, and to her it’s like a cast change in a play. A lot of the shit she was tak­ing out on Ziggy was more than likely bag­gage from pre­vi­ous rela­tion­ships, redi­rected at him.

In real terms, a two-month rela­tion­ship in the house is prob­a­bly equiv­a­lent to a full year in the real world. It would be more intense then you could ever imag­ine. I don’t envy either one of them, not even the sex. I can’t see a self-conscious shag under a duvet and the gaze of a dozen cam­eras can be very sat­is­fy­ing. I’ll never, ever know.

I was glad to see Charley go, I think she out­lasted her use­ful­ness. She was amus­ing to watch at first, but her shtick grew old and tired, fast. How can some­one be like that, with every­one, all the time? It’s just so unpleas­ant. Would you spend time with some­one who behaved like Charley? I wouldn’t, unless I was empow­ered with the right to deliver a well placed back­hand to the chops, when it all got too much.

Bye, bye, Charley. It’s back to obscu­rity for you. Channelle’s well-timed walk has stolen your week and your thun­der, at least if the tabloids are any mea­sure. Oh wait, they are.

I enjoyed fake week, which I realise must seem like ages ago now. Thalia/Pauline was hot, the tasks were amus­ing and I loved how wound up they all got by the mis­in­for­ma­tion. The plane with the ban­ner about the other house was great!

I was impressed that Car­ole seemed to see right through each and every one of BB”s tricks that week. She’s a sharp one, sometimes.

I can’t say I’m blown away by the halfway house­mates and the twists that fol­lowed, espe­cially since it’s ended up with three of them back where they started, ready to be booted out the door. I think mainly, it was the appar­ent ran­dom­ness of the final twist, send­ing Ziggy, Liam, Amy and Jonty into the main house that ruined it for me. There was no drama, no sense of the unex­pected, it was just down to a whim of the producers.

Maybe this whim was pre-planned, but it had the feel­ing of dam­age con­trol. “Oh, shit, we can’t lose Ziggy or Liam, and the Jonty guy would be a waste if he left with­out a spank­ing. And if we’re going to keep Liam, we might as well keep Amy too, so he can have a sexy, buxom, canny lass to play with…”

You get the idea.

They’re will­ing to risk Tracey, but she doesn’t really bring that much to the show any­way, so it’s a cal­cu­lated risk. Near as I can tell, as it’s a dou­ble evic­tion tonight, she’s vul­ner­a­ble, so we could still see some drama and real tears.

David is a gonner tonight, peo­ple have taken an instant dis­like to him and his giant, over­con­fi­dent ego. Only Gerry will be dis­ap­pointed to see him leave, but he didn’t have a hope in pulling him, so its prob­a­bly for the best.

The other evictee will be either Shanessa or Tracey. I’d rather see Shanessa stay, as she is real com­edy gold and car-crash TV at it’s finest. I’ve never been a Tracey fan, though I should be because we both like to get off our faces. I find her dull and her rep­e­ti­tion of those innane catch phrases just doesn’t float this hippy’s boat. I might even feel the need to cast a few votes myself.

The real ques­tion is, what hap­pens to the two peo­ple left in the halfway house? Do they move into the main house? Do the two leav­ing tonight get to choose a 3rd to come with them, live with Davina?

How the hell should I know? I’m sit­ting here on my sofa, slack-jawed and wide-eyed, watch­ing it myself, just like the rest of you!

There’s only a month left, so I guess we’re around two-thirds of the way gone. Any­thing can hap­pen and it’s not 100% that Brian is going to win. It would be cool if he did, because he always makes me laugh.

It’s always inter­est­ing to see what words peo­ple stick into Google and other search engines, which lead them to my hum­ble, lit­tle website.

I receive a wide vari­ety of sta­tis­tics via my web­site hosts, but I always like check­ing out the search-terms sec­tion. It’s always good for a laugh.

This is the cur­rent list, for the month of July, to date, count­ing up from num­ber ten:

10) “north lon­don hip­pie” – my name, spelled wrong, with spaces. I’m glad it still leads to my site and I’m glad peo­ple search for me, even with the mistakes!

9) “billi bhatti” – him off Big Brother, evicted a cou­ple of weeks ago. As you will see, BB names are pop­u­lar on this list.

8) “pur­ple ohms expe­ri­ences” – a cou­ple of years ago, I had a bad time on these pills. I took too many, I had an unpleas­ant expe­ri­ence. They’re legal highs and I think they are still avail­able, now in non-BZP form.

7) “northlon­don­hippy” – now that’s more like it, spelled cor­rectly, with­out spaces. I fea­ture twice in my own top ten, which means my brand aware­ness is high and get­ting higher. Just like me, I’m get­ting higher too, right now…!

6) “RooR Pocket Friend” – a fine pipe from my friends at RooR. I’ve writ­ten about mine a few times. Usu­ally, there are sev­eral RooR-related search terms in the top ten, but when I write about Big Brother, that tends to over­take it. Go figure!

5) “charley uchea tits” – Thus begins the breast obses­sion at the top of the list, nearly all BB related.

4) “vic­to­ria beck­ham top­less” – see, more tits. As if I would post pic­tures of that bean­pole with fake boobs!

3) “chanelle hayes mas­tur­ba­tion” — BB related, but not so breast-centric. Does any­one know if these pic­tures do exist? I wouldn’t post them, but I might like to see them myself, purely for research purposes.

2) “shab­nam paryani top­less” – I don’t really get this one, espe­cially as it is so high up on the list. Do peo­ple really want to see her top­less? I don’t even want to see her clothed! She’s scary!! Peo­ple have very weird tastes and inter­ests, but this is the inter­net, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

1) “expand­ing the­ory” – A while ago, I wrote up a silly lit­tle the­ory about what I thought the effect of the uni­verse con­stantly expand­ing would have on us. I was very high at the time and it was total bollocks.

Google doesn’t seem to think so, for if you put “expand­ing the­ory” into the world’s largest and smartest search engine, this is what you get as your top hit: CLICK HERE

Go on, check it out. My site is the top hit! Read it!

Do you really think I am an expert on the sub­ject? Should I win a Nobel Prize for inno­va­tion in science?

I should very much think not!

I don’t know if you found that inter­est­ing, but as always, I am inter­ested in what you have to say. I’d like to take an infor­mal survey:

Please email me with how you found my site. Did you stum­ble upon me via a search engine? Do you remem­ber what you were search­ing for? Maybe you saw a link to my site? Where?

How­ever you found me, I’d like to know. Please email me at thehippy@northlondonhippy.com — I won’t spam you or give/sell your address to any­one. I don’t even keep a mail­ing list. I’m just nosy.

Hands up if you’ve ever thought about being a house­mate on Big Brother…

Go on, admit it, you’ve won­dered what it would be like to be a con­tes­tant on BB. You’ve con­sid­ered how you would deal with the sit­u­a­tions. You’ve started a sen­tence with “Well, if I was in the house…”

I have too. Only, there is no way in hell I would actu­ally con­tem­plate audi­tion­ing for the pro­gramme. No way. I don’t want that sort of atten­tion; I don’t want the press on my ass. I don’t want to ever be famous.

Except, of course, here on the internet.

As much as we may all imag­ine liv­ing in that lit­tle mul­ti­coloured house in Elstree, in real­ity we don’t have a clue what its like to be trapped in that camera-coated pres­sure cooker, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for a poten­tial 13 weeks.

It all sounds beyond hor­ri­ble to me.

Yet, I sit here, slack-jawed and wide-eyed, watch­ing the high­lights show, not believ­ing what I’m see­ing and think­ing, “well, if I was in the house, I would never say/do/touch/eat…”; to what­ever I was react­ing to at the moment.

Talk about bullshit!

The truth is most of us would come apart at the seams under that sort of pres­sure and scrutiny. I also think a great num­ber of us wouldn’t get beyond the psy­cho­log­i­cal screen­ing and I’d put myself in that group too. I’d crum­ble like a rag doll in days; or worse, snap, in a big, bad scary way by snap­ping a few annoy­ing necks with a swift, deft, unex­pected jerk of my arm.

I’m not fuck­ing joking!

You wouldn’t want to see me in the house, any­way. Lim­ited cig­a­rettes, no dope, poten­tially naked and/or erect plus homi­ci­dal? Let’s leave all that to your furtive imag­i­na­tions and not mine, because it is all far too foul for me to contemplate.

Please try to remem­ber, we’re not in there. They are. We don’t know what it’s like for them, because we’ve never been in an envi­ron­ment like that.

But then, again, we don’t know any of them that well either.

We’ve got to be around day 21 now, which means we’ve really only had 19 days of high­lights pro­grammes (day 20 should be tonight – Tuesday).

If you’re like me, you watch the prime time, Chan­nel 4 daily high­lights pro­gramme. Its where I get most of my BB info because it is the offi­cial record of that day as put together by the producers.

To date, I’ve seen 19 evening high­lights pro­grammes, less 3 Fri­day night evic­tions shows and the Weds — £100,000 spe­cial. That means I’ve actu­ally seen 16 nor­mal high­light shows, 3 Fri­day night ½ hour/ one hour com­bos, and the one hour Weds big-money extravaganza.

Here comes the science:

16 high­lights x 45 mins = 720
3 Fri­days x 45 mins = 135
1 x Weds x 23 mins = 23
Total = 878 minutes

(all times are less com­mer­cials, Fri­day and Weds tim­ings also allow for live inter­views and Davina links, as well as adverts)

I can’t be both­ered to work out the aver­age num­ber of peo­ple in the house over the course of those days, so I am going to pull a num­ber out of my ass: 13.5 house­mates on aver­age per day over 19 days. If some­one wants to be more accu­rate, I wel­come your correction.

If we divide the num­ber of min­utes of actual house cov­er­age by the num­ber of aver­age house­mates, we come up with the aver­age num­ber of min­utes we’ve seen of each house­mate since the series started.

65 min­utes.

That’s how much time, on aver­age we have seen each house­mate featured.

If you really think about it, the Ziggy/Chanelle romance tips the scales heav­ily in their favour, thus reduc­ing the aver­age for other housemates.

And if you then add Charley to the mix with the amount of screen time her tirades take up, you dis­cover just how lit­tle you really know most of them.

Don’t worry, I’ll return to Charley shortly, but first I want to men­tion a cou­ple of the nearly invis­i­ble people.

Wangers.

I just like the word. It makes me laugh. Say it out loud; it will make you laugh too.

Wangers.

Unfor­tu­nately for all of us, the per­son who owns that nick­name isn’t as amus­ing. I can’t be the only one who finds her a com­plete mis­ery guts? She never has any­thing nice to say about any­thing or any­one. She’s one big, blimp-chested bum­mer, man.

Maybe that’s just the bits they’re show­ing, maybe the footage of her turn­ing cart­wheels and telling funny sto­ries is strewn across the (vir­tual) cut­ting room floor? Maybe, she’s the real enter­tainer of the house and they are hid­ing it away with the editing?

Nah!

And speak­ing of non-entities, how about Tracey?

Tracey fea­tures in the high­lights so infre­quently that one night I actu­ally started to won­der if she qui­etly went out the back­door and I some­how missed it. I’m not joking!

“Bring it on”.

“Well up for it”.

“Deal with it”

“’ave it”.

I’ve just saved you the trou­ble of watch­ing her best bits, because they are her only bits!

For fuck’s sake woman! Do something!

I don’t think Tracey is stu­pid, I actu­ally think she’s try­ing to be clever. She’s put a lot of thought into her behav­iour in the house and arrived with a very sim­ple game plan.

Tracey’s aim is to stay off everyone’s radar and coast as close to the final as she get, pos­si­bly even reach­ing it. And then, once that final hur­dle is in sight, we’ll finally get to see a more life-like ver­sion of the real Tracey, though again fil­tered through her long-term game plan.

If Tracey can pull this off, it will be impres­sive, but I think there’s a good chance the rest of them are going to get sick of the catch­phrases and she’ll be nom­i­nated again soon.

I think one of the weird­est aspects of this year’s series is the total lack of groups. In this house, it’s every man and woman for himself!

They all have allies and ene­mies, but it is far from tribal. Each and every one of them has a dif­fer­ent friends and ene­mies list, with over­laps hap­pen­ing all over the place.

Zak and Chanelle are the clos­est to any sort of real alle­giance at the moment, even if only based upon lust and yet they typ­ify this weird dynamic. They both have dif­fer­ent peo­ple they like and dif­fer­ent peo­ple they hate and nei­ther one of them really blinks any eye at the other over this.

Ok, Ziggy’s reac­tion to the Billi/Chanelle rumours not with­stand­ing, but I think we’d all agree that roman­tic jeal­ousy should be an excep­tion to the hypoth­e­sis. The green-eyed mon­ster can only fuck you up!

The best exam­ple of this “every man for your­self” phe­nom­e­non is Charley. See, I told you I’d come back to her.

Charley will claim to love each and every one of them, while telling them that that, “she’s not being funny, right, but…” insert insult­ing, profanity-laden shrieks at any­one else.

Charley is nice to peo­ple when it suits her and hor­ri­ble to them when it amuses her. Just look at how she enjoyed humil­i­at­ing poor Brian when he showed her his erec­tion, which she knew she inspired. Then, com­ment­ing on his maybe-wank, with glee­ful spite, while know­ing the guy is 18 years old and her dirty, sug­ges­tive talk got his hopes up. Urghhh!

Or worse, tak­ing the piss out of him because he pissed the bed. Not nice!

And by the way, can Brian really be that stu­pid? I can’t imag­ine any­one over the age of, oh I don’t know, birth…not know­ing who Romeo, Juli­ette or Shake­speare is!

Was he putting it on? Was it an act, meant to make him popular?

If it was an act, it didn’t work.

If it was gen­uine, then oh my god, the future is fucked! Thank­fully, cli­mate change and global warm­ing will mean that it won’t mat­ter how stu­pid tomorrow’s gen­er­a­tion is, because they’ll all be too busy killing each other over the last few drops of drink­ing water.

Ah, happy days.

The rea­son I’ve titled this abor­tion of a BB col­umn “The Char­lie Show” is sim­ple, that’s what I’ve been watching.

You’ve been watch­ing it too, only I bet you’re reluc­tant to admit it.

I was the same, but then I thought about how lit­tle we actu­ally see and how much she dom­i­nates every­thing. I don’t like her, but I like watch­ing her.

Think about it.

Really, take a moment, and pon­der what I am sub­mit­ting for your consideration.

Charley has been the star of the show. She’s the wannabe it-girl, you love to hate!

Check out my friends, the tabloid news­pa­pers. She fea­tures promi­nently almost every damn day. The red tops are usu­ally a good barom­e­ter for pub­lic opin­ion and on that basis, we are all enjoy­ing watch­ing Charley. We just wouldn’t want to invite her ‘round for a cup of tea.

That’s so cool with me.

The kind of peo­ple I’d invite over for a cuppa (wink – you know what *I* really – an exotic ciggy), are not the kind of peo­ple I’d want to watch on BB. My mates are all fairly well adjusted, sorted, nor­mal types.

You know, like me!

Ha!

I think there’s a very good chance our girl, Charley, is going to be up for evic­tion this week and dammit all to hell, its too soon for her to go!

It’s week three and there are ten more weeks remain­ing. It is way too early for Charley to go. I’m not say­ing she has to win; I’m not even say­ing she has to make the final, but for the love of god, can we please not be stu­pid and vote her out too early?

Please?

PLEASE?

We’ve made this mis­take in pre­vi­ous series, get­ting rid of the mad, crazy, (un)likeable ones first, only to com­plain it’s become bor­ing a week or two later. Let’s just avoid this sce­nario, ok?

There will be other chances to get rid of Charley, I promise you.

Let’s all agree to leave Charley alone this week.

I will, if you will?

I inad­ver­tently hit upon some­thing in my last BB piece, which is indica­tive of the cast­ing of the entire series. The more I’ve watched, the more this fact has stood out:

Every­one in there is very media savvy; they are very aware of the process and the part they are play­ing in it.

My first clue to this was when Emily Parr men­tioned sev­eral cor­po­rate brand names, right after her racist slip of the tongue. She was hop­ing that they would dip the sound and spare her fur­ther embar­rass­ment – well, we all know how that turned out!

The point is, Emily was very hip to the game, even if she was too pig igno­rant to apply her knowl­edge with any great effect. Emily’s not the only one.

Let’s take everyone’s favourite housemate…to hate, young Charley Uchea. She’s appar­ently worked a pole dancer, that’s a form of enter­tainer; she had to deal with pubic, er pub­lic atten­tion. I’m sure she knows what pole danc­ing audi­ence wants to see. She’s also got a cousin who plays Pre­mier­ship foot­ball, hangs out in all the “hot clubs” and has had sex with other “celebs”, at least that’s what the papers say. She’s more clued up than you might realise at first and she knows how to use it all to her advan­tage. If it wasn’t for her sour face and ugly per­son­al­ity, she might be a threat!

First evictee, Shab­nam Paryani is another great exam­ple of this media aware­ness. On day 3, when she was con­sid­er­ing a walk out the back door, did she ask about how quickly she could see her fam­ily? Did she ask if there would be men­tal health sup­port? Did she even ask if she could have a hot meal once she got out­side? Nope, all she was inter­ested in was her “pack­age”. No, that is not some vague ref­er­ence to the rumour that Shabs is a pre-op trans­sex­ual. Shab­nam wanted to know if she could still sell her story to a tabloid or glossy mag­a­zine. She wanted to know if she would get to appear on BBLB and BBBM. She wanted to know if her bra and knick­ers pics would be in a Sun­day tabloid news­pa­per, with rev­e­la­tions of her secret love ses­sions with men AND women.

Shab­nam didn’t walk, but her desire to dis­close her sex­ual his­tory while pos­ing in her undies did appear in yesterday’s News of the World. So you see girls, being stu­pid and doing noth­ing doesn’t mean you can’t have your dreams come true! Who needs an edu­ca­tion or skills?

And while I’m on the scary sub­ject of Shabs, how about that ass-crack of an evic­tion rou­tine! If that didn’t con­firm how sub­nor­mally intel­li­gent she is, what else would? How about the shrink on Sunday’s BBLB telling Der­mot that her IQ was under 70? Yikes!

Yes, I know I’m being harsh, but that’s my point. Those who live by the media, die by the media and I should know, because I’m the media whore you all love to adore! But you won’t see me skulk­ing around Bou­jis hop­ing to get papped!

This is by far the most self-aware group of house­mates ever. They know the fourth wall is there and they are play­ing to it with reck­less aban­don, because they know if they can paint the right pic­ture of them­selves to the out­side world, great riches await.

I’ll just throw some ran­dom obser­va­tions out there, hap­haz­ardly drawn together from my own per­sonal media monitoring:

- Seány O’Kane – trav­elled to the states to fol­low the Michael Jack­son trial, was inter­viewed repeat­edly by British TV crews, as the lone, crazy from back home, Report­edly audi­tioned for Bad Lad’s Army, was rejected for not being “men­tally sta­ble” enough.

- Shab­nam Paryani – Appeared on Britain’s Got (no) Tal­ent and some pro­gramme about embar­rass­ing illnesses.

- Billi Bhatti – one of the new guys, a model who has done print work and, if what I read on forums is true, snogged a trans­sex­ual in a music video. Does any­one know if it was Shabnam?

- Jonathan Dur­den – mil­lion­aire, media company-owner and for­mer com­men­ta­tor for the Guardian on adver­tis­ing. Sound like a real media insider to me. What’s he doing in the house? Ladies and gen­tle­men, start your con­spir­acy theories!

- Chanelle Hayes – a posh spice look-a-like, mak­ing per­sonal appear­ances as Vic­to­ria Beckham.

- Zak “Ziggy” Lich­man – for­mer boy­band mem­ber, model and music producer.

I could go on, and on and fre­quently do, but you get the idea. This year, it is an open secret that fame and for­tune is what they all crave. They all think that just on their looks and per­son­al­ity alone, we should love them and give them lots of money and ado­ra­tion, but we know better.

I like the fact that they are all unashamed, wannabes. It brings an ele­ment of hon­esty to BB this year that we’ve not seen before. It’s a know­ing wink from the pro­duc­ers, that they know that we know that the house­mates know just what is await­ing them after a stay in that house.

In the first series, win­ner Craig Phillips wanted to win the sev­enty grand so he could pay for an oper­a­tion for a young woman with Down’s Syn­drome, which at the time, moved most of us to tears. Craig’s gen­eros­ity was touch­ing and genuine.

In this series, they all want to win so bad they can taste it. Then they’ll have the money to shop for cloth­ing and sun­glasses, so they can look nice on hol­i­day in the Mal­dives where they get snapped, sun­bathing top­less “in the secret pho­tos they didn’t want you to see”, which paid for the trip, plus a lit­tle extra for a pair or two of Manolo Blahniks.

Isn’t that what we all dream of?

I was really expect­ing not to like this year’s BB. I’d already set myself up for bit­ter dis­ap­point­ment at what was going to be a dull series. So far, it’s been any­thing but dull and I’m lov­ing it, already!

It doesn’t take much to draw me in; just a bunch of fit, but stu­pid young girlies and other assorted human odd­i­ties, a small, enclosed space and lots of cam­eras. I’m a sucker, what can I say?

There were rumours of an all-female house, but I didn’t buy into them. I thought it was a risk the pro­duc­tion team wouldn’t be will­ing to take. How wrong was I?

As I watched the house­mates enter­ing the shiny new house, for the first time, I felt pity for many of them. They all just seemed so small, so lim­ited and so myopic with their sim­ple goals of fame and for­tune, for doing sweet FA. The best exam­ple of this is 19 year old Chanelle Hayes, the Posh Spice wannabe.

Chanelle comes from a small vil­lage out­side Leeds and lit­er­ally aspires to be Vic­to­ria Beck­man. I find that very sad, for as role mod­els go, VB cer­tainly shouldn’t be one, unless you value stu­pid­ity, van­ity and under-eating to nearly star­va­tion as some­thing to be cel­e­brated. Appar­ently, the news­pa­pers do, for this if the woman some much as farts (as if!), it is splat­tered on the front pages.

Chanelle is much bet­ter look­ing than ol’ Posh Pish­face and can prob­a­bly sing bet­ter too.

The first thing I thought when I saw the ini­tial 11 women in the house is that there wouldn’t be enough Page 3’s to go around. Most of them are going to want to don a thong, fold their arms artis­ti­cally across their as-of-yet un-surgically enhanced bosoms and smile pretty for the cam­eras, with an accom­pa­ny­ing inter­view detail­ing their Big Brother hell! Ok, maybe not Car­ole, but then again you never know.

Car­ole Vin­cent was an early favourite of mine, with her left lean­ing pol­i­tics and bisex­u­al­ity, what was not to love? But has she put any creepy moves on any of the other women? Has she done any­thing other than clean the house and act as a ser­vant to the rest of them? Big dis­ap­point­ment so far, but it is early days.

And speak­ing of crotch­ety old broads, how about that Les­ley Brain, appro­pri­ately named because of her enor­mous intel­lect. She really fan­cied her­self as so much bet­ter than the rest of her house­mates. She’s used to get her own way, and walk­ing all over any­one who impeded her. I can’t say I was dis­ap­pointed when she walked out on Sat­ur­day. Small loss, she didn’t con­tribute much more than snarky com­ments and dis­ap­prov­ing looks. Yawn.

The twins, Sam and Amanda Archant, fall into the pity cat­e­gory. They’re ever so cute and ever so dim, but their Page 3 pho­to­shoot will be a double-spread. Every­one will buy a copy of what­ever red­top is lucky enough to print the pics that day!

And stay­ing with the pity party, may I draw your atten­tion to the deluded Shab­nam Paryani, who won’t be appear­ing on Page 3 any­time soon, though in her mind she is wor­thy of that, and more. She’s weird look­ing, obnox­ious and thick, which makes her a triple threat in BB terms. If the evic­tion hadn’t been can­celled, she’d be mak­ing a pub­lic appear­ance right now at the open­ing of a Pound Shop on my High Street.

And speak­ing of can­celled evic­tions, I couldn’t believe the bloody stu­pid­ity of that ultra-dim Emily Parr. She was des­tined for Page 3, but not any­more, unless the BNP newslet­ter has such a fea­ture. I wouldn’t know, I don’t sub­scribe and nei­ther do you, if you’re a proper hippyfan!

What was Emily think­ing? Was she even think­ing? Did she really know what the word meant as it passed through her lips?

I bet she sure as shit does now! This is girl who thinks indy music is brand new and sweep­ing the nation! She has the men­tal age of 7.

But Emily wasn’t com­pletely stu­pid, as right after she uttered the offend­ing word, she quickly men­tioned sev­eral cor­po­rate brand names. Why? So they would dip the sound on the live feed? Clever, eh? She might not know any­thing about race rela­tions, but damn, if she ain’t media savvy! Shame it wasn’t enough to keep it out of the prime time high­light show or keep her in the house, but you can’t blame a gal for trying!

Were they right to boot her out? After Shilpa-gate, they didn’t really have a choice. They had to be seen to be doing some­thing, and swiftly. If they acted this quickly last Jan­u­ary with Shilpa and the witches’ coven, they wouldn’t be apol­o­gis­ing so much right now!

And who are the 900 peo­ple who com­plained that it was unfair to eject Emily? She can’t have that many friends and fam­ily members!

Emily was an aspir­ing actress and I said “was” inten­tion­ally. With that one word uttered fool­ish­lyy, she’s pretty much kissed her glit­ter­ing show­biz career good­bye. I don’t see how she can reha­bil­i­tate her­self back from this one.

Sorry, Emily, I’m sure you’ll Google your way to this page even­tu­ally. That’s my con­sid­ered opin­ion, but remem­ber it’s never too late to learn IT and com­puter net­work­ing skills! You’ll never go hungry!

I know I men­tioned Chanelle ear­lier, but I want to come back to her. Along with Nicky Maxwell, Chanelle has a good back­story; they both do. Nicky was raised in Mother Theresa’s orphan­age in India, before being adopted by a fam­ily here in the UK. Chanelle’s mother was a pros­ti­tute who was mur­dered and has also been adopted. I’m a sucker for a sob story, so are the tabloids. Only, and trust me on this, the tabloids pro­vide a lot in the way of lurid details than I will.

Charley Uchea is a nasty piece of work. She’s the sort of girl your mother would have warned you about, if your mother could have ever imag­ined that such a woman even existed! My mother could never have pic­tured Charley!

Hot body, ugly face, even uglier per­son­al­ity! Another BB triple threat. Buy her a drink? She’d want the bot­tle, and trust me mate, it wouldn’t be cheap! Her cousin plays foot­ball, that’s why she’s spe­cial. Page 3 chances: High, high, high!

Wangers.

Wangers?

When I was a kid, “wang” was another word for your din­kle, so wangers is a new one on me. I’m old, I don’t always keep up with the lingo you kids are using these days.

What­ever hap­pened to tits?

Laura Williams, AKA “Wangers” has ginor­mus breasts and a Welsh accent. She wants to be a funeral direc­tor, which is code for under­taker, which is fur­ther code for peo­ple who pre­pare the dead. Yuck. I don’t even like to touch raw beef or pork!

I don’t really get Laura, but appar­ently you all do, as up until the 2 new guys went in, she was the book­ies’ favourite to win!

Tracey Barnard scares me. She’s the sort of intense per­son who would cor­ner you at a party, get really in your face and spout her pas­sion­ate opin­ions on one sub­ject or an other for an hour or more and at the end of it, you still wouldn’t know what she was talk­ing about. Tracey is a type we’ve not seen before in BB (unless you count Bez from the celeb ver­sion), but a type none the less. Go on any demo, attend any ille­gal rave, or visit your near­est squat and you’ll find a Tracey-type, bor­ing he shite out of someone.

You’d think an old hippy like me would like Tracey; you’d be wrong. I did like the rumour they were test­ing her rolling papers for drugs, but that’s stu­pid. If she were going to smug­gle in some blot­ter acid, she wouldn’t do it on the cig­a­rette papers, but on the packet – prob­a­bly the flap – you know the bit you tear to make a roach! It’s made of card­board and far more absorbent. I just hope she does some­thing fun with it, like put it in the stew, so they can all trip their nuts off.

If only Tracey brought in some dull, rusty knives, then my BB dreams would really come true. Click HERE and/or HERE to see what I mean!

That’s the girls all well and truly slagged off, now what about the guys?

For­mer boy­band mem­ber and male model, Zak “Ziggy” Lich­man seems nice enough, in an innocu­ous, inof­fen­sive way. He’s dull, but the chicks dig him and isn’t that what really mat­ters. They deserve some eye-candy too. And I don’t blame him for zero­ing in on Chanelle, she is the hottest lit­tle hotty in the house!

Big Brother’s big twist when they put in the next two men was to send him a pair of gay guys. Whoa! What a turn! Gay men on BB, who’d have thunk it?

I haven’t really seen much of either one of them, so I will save my ini­tial impres­sions until my next post.

I don’t hate every­thing about this series, there are things I do like, they just don’t hap­pen to be the house­mates, that’s all.

I like the new house, I think the design is fan­tas­tic. I love the colours, the lay­out, espe­cially the lit­tle entrance­way to the diary room, with the colour-changing light strips. I like the new graph­ics and the eye as well.

Mainly, I still love the for­mat, even with the twists and changes. Lock­ing peo­ple up in a small, con­fined space and film­ing their every move is still pure, unadul­ter­ated genius.

I only wish it was my idea; then I would be filthy, stink­ing rich! I bet that’s a good thing to be. I’ll prob­a­bly never know.

Where’d the last year go?

It seems like it wasn’t that long ago that I was pre­view­ing the sev­enth series of Big Brother, and now here I am writ­ing about BB 8, which launches on Chan­nel 4 this evening.

Can you feel the excitement?

Nei­ther can I.

Usu­ally, there is more of a build-up to the start of a BB series, but it seems to me that there’s far less of a buzz. It seems that the whole thing is dis­tinctly low key.

That’s prob­a­bly inten­tional fol­low­ing the inter­na­tional con­tro­versy sur­round­ing Celebrity BB, a few months ago. Remem­ber? Shilpa Shetty vs Jade Goody? How could you forget!

The pro­duc­ers of BB, Ende­mol, don’t want any trou­ble, yet they know that the pro­gramme is really only suc­cess­ful when there is con­flict. Chan­nel 4, on the other hand, view BB as the cash cow that it is; it’s respon­si­ble for gen­er­at­ing the lion’s share of C4’s annual income, so they want to be as cau­tious as possible.

C4’s desire to avoid any prob­lems have led to var­i­ous rumours: about a crack police squad mon­i­tor­ing the live feed, with pow­ers to arrest house­mates or shut the entire thing down; news­pa­per reports that C4 has vetoed sev­eral poten­tial house­mates for being a bit too “wacky”, instead insist­ing on safer choices. And most of all, they have stated that the theme of this year’s series is “fun and love”.

Oh dear. I really hope most of that is bull­shit. Per­son­ally, I’d rather see the police out on the streets, arrest­ing vio­lent crim­i­nals, not watch­ing TV for three months!

The house design is meant to reflect this sense of fun. They’ve put the cooker in the bed­room! Crazy, man! They might even deny them a toaster and ket­tle! Good, golly, gosh, what will they do?

Am I sound­ing a bit jaded this time around? Damn straight, I am. BB is sup­posed get big­ger, meaner, wilder, and nas­tier, every year and it feels like we’ve taken sev­eral giant steps backwards.

I don’t want a kinder, gen­tler, Big Brother. That would suck in so many ways and on so many lev­els. I want twists, I want con­flict, and I want peo­ple to hate each other! That’s not too much to ask for, is it?

There’s one wild­card in all of this, that will com­pen­sate for what­ever steps the pow­ers that be take, to keep things level and that’s the 12 new house­mates. Even with all the screen­ing and psy­chi­atric test­ing, they are still just peo­ple and that makes them unpre­dictable. It’s down to them to do things that keep us all hooked.

And we will be hooked, we always are; the pro­gramme is addic­tive. I don’t know about you, but I have an addic­tive per­son­al­ity and just can’t help myself. Once I start watch­ing, I know I’ll stay with it till the bit­ter end. You will too.

As I’ve said count­less times, I am a sucker for the for­mat. What does that say about me? What does it say about every­one who watches?

It says that deep down, we’re all voyeurs and given the chance, we’d sneak a peak at anything.

Do your ears perk up when you hear some­one whis­per­ing? When you see a mar­ried cou­ple bick­er­ing in a shop, do you try to secretly glance their way, to see what you can pick up? And when your neigh­bours argue, do you turn down the TV, to try to hear what they are saying?

Big Brother is almost the same, though you need not hide your shame when you stare at it, full-on, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Big Brother appeals to the secret Peep­ing Tom in all of us.

Con­tro­versy will always find a way, where BB is con­cerned. I’m sure no mat­ter what they do to keep things calm, it will still make the front pages of the news­pa­pers before the sum­mer is out. “Big Brother in SOMETHING shock” the head­lines will scream.

At the very end of the series, so says another rumour, they are going to blow the house up, as they are mov­ing to a new loca­tion next year. That would imply that the explo­sives would need to be set before the finale, in and around the remain­ing house­mates. Is that safe? Does it mat­ter? At least it insures one way or another, that we will see some sparks fly inside that house!

So there you go, that’s my lit­tle look ahead to the next three months of BB. Expect spo­radic hippy cov­er­age of Big Brother 8, right here, when­ever I feel like it.

It seems I’m not the only one writ­ing about Celebrity Big Brother.

Since my last entry, it appears that the entire world, from here to Mum­bai and back again, is talk­ing about one thing: Celebrity Big Brother!

Who would have thought that a hum­ble lit­tle tele­vi­sion show could cause such inter­na­tional chaos?

Not me, that’s for sure, but in the last day even Tony Blair and Gor­don Brown have weighed in on the sub­ject. Yes, Big Brother is the big story!

All of this con­tro­versy has turned what I would describe as an oth­er­wise fairly sub-standard series into his­tory mak­ing tele­vi­sion. It is now offi­cially the most com­plained about pro­gramme ever!

It’s also improved the view­ing fig­ures with a mil­lion or more peo­ple tun­ing into the high­lights show on Chan­nel 4 over the last cou­ple of nights.

As always, Ende­mol win, but they’re not the only ones.

As hor­ri­bly as Shilpa Shetty is being treated, when she emerges from the house, she will be more pop­u­lar and more well known then ever before. As an entertainment-business com­mod­ity, she will be demand here in the UK as well as in India.

And if she wasn’t a Bol­ly­wood super­star before, she cer­tainly is now! Accord­ing to the media, her fel­low coun­try­men and women are very upset at how she is being treated by her CBB co-stars. There have been protests, gov­ern­ment state­ments; even her mother did the rounds on TV here in the UK to defend Shilpa.

But Shilpa requires no defence; for she has done noth­ing wrong, except to agree to come to the UK and appear on CBB. If she asked me, I would have told her to give it a miss.

Shipa’s sup­port is not just com­ing from India, as there are many peo­ple in the UK from var­ied back­grounds, who are behind her as well. We’re not all racist louts!

The biggest loser of this series has got to be Jade Goody and it will take a lot of work and skil­ful PR for her to regain her sta­tus in the indus­try. She’ll play the race card her­self and remind us that she is one-quarter black, but that’s no excuse. There is no excuse.

I don’t actu­ally believe racism is at the heart of all of this, though it cer­tainly has played a part. At the root of the col­lec­tive hatred of Shipa by the evil three in the house is even more basic. She’s different.

If Shilpa were a posh, rich, white chick from Chelsea, they would all still hate her; they would just choose dif­fer­ent ways of insult­ing her. If any­thing, dif­fer­ences in class and deco­rum are the more obvi­ous rea­sons; the fact that Shilpa is from India, just gives them an aspect of her being to ver­bally attack.

Jade, Jo and Danielle are not very bright; they do not know much about the wider world around them and are woe­fully igno­rant of other cul­tures. If Shilpa were some class­less, rude, skank, they would be friends with her, regard­less of her skin colour.

The rumour is that Shilpa will be up against Jade for evic­tion on Fri­day night. I sin­cerely hope this is true, as I think Jade deserves the most shock­ingly bad recep­tion ever as she comes out of the house and Shilpa deserves to stay. Dialling fin­gers to the ready, my beloved hippyfans!

Actu­ally, Shilpa deserves to win! Let’s make it happen!